Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Followers of top PH twitter users, how many of them are fakes?

Following the analysis of my own twitter account, I decided to test the accounts of the 10 most followed Filipino individuals on twitter and see their fake-inactive-good follower ratios.

The rankings are generated via Zoomsphere, the results are subject to the accuracy of StatusPeople and the number of followers on the time of individual analysis.

Before diving in to the results, here's a tidbit from Fast Company:

It appears that if your faker numbers are below 20 percent, you're doing OK. The more followers you have, the higher the fake percentage due to more exposure to spam bots. Interestingly, from what I've seen on blogs and in my own experience, the folks with faker percentages hovering 30-40 percent and higher are most often people you've rarely heard about

Take note that these are well-known, celebrity types:

  1. annecurtissmith - 3,300,427 followers
    Fake - 50%
    Inactive - 38%
    Good - 12%
  2. iamsuperbianca - 1,725,502 followers
    Fake - 42%
    Inactive - 45%
    Good - 13%
  3. samuelmilby - 1,827,900 followers
    Fake - 53%
    Inactive - 39%
    Good - 8%
  4. iyavillania - 1,557,899 followers
    Fake - 48%
    Inactive - 39%
    Good - 13%
  5. kuyakim_atienza - 1,393,145 followers
    Fake - 47%
    Inactive - 40%
    Good - 13%
  6. nikkigil - 1,378,549 followers
    Fake - 58%
    Inactive - 36%
    Good - 6%
  7. dprincessmaja - 1,314,135 followers
    Fake - 52%
    Inactive - 39%
    Good - 9%
  8. MsLeaSalonga - 1,134,581 followers
    Fake - 41%
    Inactive - 45%
    Good - 14%
  9. noynoyaquino - 1,043,004 followers
    Fake - 43%
    Inactive - 39%
    Good - 18%
  10. officialcharice - 920,640 followers
    Fake - 31%
    Inactive - 45%
    Good - 24%

The average fake followers for these accounts is almost half - 46% while the real ones (the 'Inactives' plus the 'Goods') is at 54%. That's pretty big, and that number can still go down if we remove the inactive followers.

This may suggest several things:

  • They are buying twitter followers.
  • Popular people are fake account magnets.
  • Perhaps this fake, bot-created accounts are sentient and loves to follow celebs just like the average twitter user.
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